Hey guys I am making an AMV (which I am new to) and the source is a 1080p mkv with 23.976fps. Whenever I extract the h264 to turn into an mp4 (so I can use Vegas or Adobe) I feel like the h264 is laggy, even though it is the same fps as the source.

I am seriously considering redownloading the show in 720p rather than using 1080p. I don't think many projectors in small cons are going to take advantage of 1080p so it feels like extra weight.

The download maybe the original problem and as Pwolf said convert your sources to lossless files to make it faster to process aswell as keeping the quality. Also instead of getting the show in 720p again you could just resize the file dimensions down from 1080p to 720p in Avisynth or even in the program you are using. For example After Effects while editing allows scaling which resizes the original source.

Lagarith has better compression in ALL cases, it has a significantly more complicated compression scheme and 3 or so levels of losslessness compared to a very simple scheme that UTV uses. Of course compressibility depends more on the prediction models but Lagarith and UTV use the same models at the moment.

I'm a bit confused here. MKV is a container. So under my assumption, wouldn't H264 be a video stream contained with MP4 at the lossless level? My concern here is that I'm running into somewhat of a similar situation with Blu-Ray rips. I figured a 2 pass rip conversion net me something of lossless quality if the bit rate is high enough?

Ryvannis wrote:I'm a bit confused here. MKV is a container. So under my assumption, wouldn't H264 be a video stream contained with MP4 at the lossless level? My concern here is that I'm running into somewhat of a similar situation with Blu-Ray rips. I figured a 2 pass rip conversion net me something of lossless quality if the bit rate is high enough?

The OP isn't talking about remuxing, just re-encoding. As to your question, a 2 pass encode will always be lossy unless you do it lossless, in which case why bother with 2 pass at all? To get lossy codec bitrate high enough to be almost identical, the filesize is larger than just doing it losslessly in the first place.